In a devastated Turkish city, the vigil continues for more corpses

ADIYAMAN, Turkey — After his sister and niece were trapped in the ruins of their apartment building during an earthquake that hit southern Turkey last week, Cigdem Ulgen rushed to the scene to try and rescue them.

He had no way of digging through the tangle of metal and concrete that remained of the building in the hard-hit city of Adiyaman, so he settled into the street with his mother and siblings for a wait that grew more excruciating as the hours wore on, and then the days.

While rescue teams dug through the rubble, the family rummaged through chairs and a sofa. Volunteers distributed metal fires, bottles of water, lentil soup, hand cream, cigarettes and oranges. More than a week later, they were still there, waiting for news. they hadn’t arrived yet.

“We are always here. We sit. We try to sleep. We eat what people bring us, not the government,” said Ulgen, 38. “We won’t leave until they’re gone.”

Nine days after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake and powerful aftershock hit the area on February 6, death has become part of daily life across the seismic zone, with more than 40,000 dead in Turkey and Syria, and an increase in the number of victims is expected.

During this time, Turkish media have consistently reported on daring and improbable rescues, such as that of an 18-year-old boy who was pulled alive from the ruins of Adiyaman on Tuesday, 198 hours after the earthquake. But how these saves are becoming rarerfamilies hunker down near the rubble throughout the disaster area, waiting for their loved ones to be found.

Impromptu vigils are simple and painful encounters. Families sit on sidewalks, squat on rooftops and climb nearby rubble to watch bulldozers scrape the concrete. They stoke bonfires with wood salvaged from broken cabinets and shutters to ward off the winter chill, and brew tea over the flames.

While they wait, rescue teams interrogate them to find out how many people were in a building when it collapsed like a Jenga tower, or how to get across the roof to reach a missing woman’s bedroom.

When bodies are exhumed, often disfigured or decomposing, they lie in wait while body bags are briefly opened to identify next of kin – by face, missing teeth, toenail fungus or earrings – and be able to to bury.

Many of the families are angry with the government and say so they didn’t see rescue teams until two or three days after the earthquake, when the chance to rescue survivors was rapidly dwindling. The confusion continued, they say, as rescue teams, both Turkish and international, came and went, some without equipment to do the job, others leaving before they were done.

As they waited, their hopes were dashed.

“We came here earlier thinking we could save them,” said Ibrahim Savas, Ulgen’s brother. “Then we thought maybe we could have saved them, but injured. Now we’re just waiting to get their bodies back“.

He and two of his sisters, who also lived elsewhere in Turkey, fled to Adiyaman after the earthquake and were surprised to find no one searching his sister’s building.

They soon discovered that a rescue team had already been working in the building next door and left. The day after the quake, workers recovered the bodies of Yakup Tas, a deputy from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, and his family members, state media reported. But when Ulgen arrived on the scene that afternoon, rescuers were nowhere to be found.

“They came with everything they had for the legislature,” Ulgen said. “And then they left.”

A week later, the family was still waiting when rescue teams dumped three black bags containing four bodies on the street. A family that had camped beside them came forward, hands over their noses and mouths, to scrutinize the corpses, complaining about what they saw.

Half an hour later, the other family was gone, the fire that had kept them warm had turned to ashes, their vigil was over. Ulgen and his relatives continued to wait.

Elsewhere, relatives of the missing sat on bricks, planks and blankets as rescue teams dug in three spots for 12 bodies believed to remain in the ruins.

“We usually stay until 4 in the morningthen we go to nearby tents or cars to sleep for two hours and come back,” said a soldier who was waiting for the remains of three relatives and gave only his name, Yasin, following army protocol. “We don’t eat that much .”

The workers dug a body bag out of the rubble.

“Leyla,” a relative said, identifying the woman it held, and sobs erupted from the crowd. Shortly thereafter a second body arrived.

Around Adiyaman, residents scavenged possessions from what was left of their homes: blankets, photo albums, carpets, a pair of jeans worn by a dead brother with a car key and a folding knife still in his pocket.

Near a public clock that had been frozen in time at 4:17 a.m. at the time of the quake, men rummaging through a hole in the rubble unearthed dusty but intact bottles of liquor.

According to Mustafa Gokhan Demir, his family’s liquor store was located on the ground floor of the building. They had planned to clean the bottles in hopes of selling them elsewhere.

“It’s All We Have Left”She said.

By sunset, dozens of workers from Turkish and international teams were working in another vast area, where several buildings had collapsed on top of each other, leaving piles of rubble. A group of Turkish miners inspected the wooden supports of a hole to avoid collapses; a Bangladeshi man dressed in red and gray camouflage was hammering on a tiled floor. Groups from China and Sudan relaxed by the bonfires, and two first responders from Virginia watched.

Petr Slachta, a member of a Czech team, said they had deployed sniffer dogs, thermal cameras, six-metre-long “snake” cameras and sensitive equipment to detect voices deep in the rubble. In one week they had found about 50 people. Only three were alive. I didn’t expect there would be many more.

Sitting by the fire on an oil barrel near the rubble, Mehmet Tas, a construction engineer, said he fled to Adiyaman, his hometown, from Istanbul soon after the earthquake. Since then she has been camping with her relatives, waiting for her sister, husband and mother, as well as the couple’s three grandchildren, aged 4, 5 and 6.

More than a week after the earthquake, only the children were still missing.

As men stoked the fire to prepare for nightfall and the Czech team erected a glowing globe on a pole to illuminate the rubble, Tas said he hoped some families would stay in the city to help rebuild and wondered when schools would reopen.

People who have left have felt like a “fish out of water” elsewhere, he said, adding that he hoped the men would one day meet again in the evenings in city cafes to exchange the day’s news.

But for now, all he could do was wait.

“There are three people in there,” he says, pointing to the rubble. “They’re not out yet.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society